“One of your friends was very hard upon my son—and myself—at your Meeting the other night, Miss Beecham.”
“He was very injudicious,” said Phoebe, shaking her head. “Indeed I did not approve. Personalities never advance any cause. I said so to him. Don’t you think the Church has herself to blame for those political Dissenters, Mr. May? You sneer at us, and look down upon us—”
“I? I don’t sneer at anybody.”
“I don’t mean you individually; but Churchmen do. They treat us as if we were some strange kind of creatures, from the heart of Africa perhaps. They don’t think we are just like themselves: as well educated; meaning as well; with as much right to our own ideas.”
Mr. May could scarcely restrain a laugh. “Just like themselves.” The idea of a Dissenter setting up to be as well educated, and as capable of forming an opinion, as a cultivated Anglican, an Oxford man, and a beneficed clergyman, was too novel and too foolish not to be somewhat startling as well. Mr. May was aware that human nature is strangely blind to its own deficiencies, but was it possible that any delusion could go so far as this? He did laugh a little—just the ghost of a laugh—at the idea. But what is the use of making any serious opposition to such a statement? The very fact of contesting the assumption seemed to give it a certain weight.
“Whenever this is done,” said Phoebe, with serene philosophy, “I think you may expect a revulsion of feeling. The class to which papa belongs is very friendly to the Established Church, and wishes to do her every honour.”
“Is it indeed? We ought to be much gratified,” said Mr. May.
Phoebe gave him a quick glance, but he composed his face and met her look meekly. It actually diverted him from his preoccupation, and that is a great deal to say.
“We would willingly do her any honour; we would willingly be friends, even look up to her, if that would please her,” added Phoebe, very gravely, conscious of the importance of what she was saying; “but when we see clergymen, and common persons also, who have never had one rational thought on the subject, always setting us down as ignorant and uncultured, because we are Dissenters—”
“But no one does that,” said Ursula, soothingly, eager to save her new friend’s feelings. She paused in the act of pouring out the children’s second cup of tea, and looked up at her with eyes full of caressing and flattering meaning. “No one, at least, I am sure,” she added, faltering, remembering suddenly things she had heard said of Dissenters, “who knows you.”
“It is not I that ought to be thought of, it is the general question. Then can you wonder that a young man like the gentleman we were talking of, clever and energetic, and an excellent scholar (and very good in philosophy, too—he was at Jena for two or three years), should be made bitter when he feels himself thrust back upon a community of small shopkeepers?”
Mr. May could not restrain another short laugh.
“We must not join in the vulgar abuse of shopkeepers,” he said.
Phoebe’s colour rose. She raised her head a little, then perceiving the superiority of her former position, smiled.
“I have no right to do so. My people, I suppose, were all shopkeepers to begin with; but this gives me ways of knowing. Grandpapa is very kind and nice—really nice, Mr. May; but he has not at all a wide way of looking at things. I feel it, though they are so kind to me. I have been brought up to think in such a different way; and if I feel it, who am fond of them, think how that young minister must feel it, who was brought up in a totally different class?”
“What kind of class was this one brought up in?” said Mr. May, with a laugh. “He need not have assaulted Reginald, if he had been born a prince. We had done him no harm.”
“That is making it entirely a private question,” said Phoebe, suavely, “which I did not mean to do. When such a man finds out abuses—what he takes to be abuses—in the Church, which treats him like a roadside ranter, may not he feel a right to be indignant? Oh, I am not so. I think such an office as that chaplaincy is very good, one here and there for the reward of merit; and I think he was very right to take it; but still it would not do, would it, to have many of them? It would not answer any good purpose,” she said, administering a little sting scientifically, “if all clergymen held sinecures.”
These words were overheard by Reginald, who just then came in, and to whom it was startling to find Phoebe serenely seated at tea with his family. The hated word sinecure did not seem to affect him from her lips as it would have done from anyone else’s. He came in quite good-humouredly, and said with a smile—
“You are discussing me. What about me? Miss Beecham, I hope you take my side.”
“I take everybody’s side,” said Phoebe; “for I try to trace people’s motives. I can sympathise both with you and those who assailed you.”
“Oh, that Dissenting fellow. I beg your pardon, Miss Beecham, if you are a Dissenter; but I cannot help it. We never go out of our way to attack them and their chapels and coteries, and why should they spring at our throats on
